Mobile communications have evolved to a point where broadband services are available through traditional cellular networks as well as through local wireless networks, such as those supported by the IEEE 802.11 standards for local wireless area networks and Bluetooth standards. Although local wireless access generally supports higher data rates, cellular coverage is much more pervasive. Further, local wireless access is readily made available in areas where cellular access may not be available, such as in buildings or the like. In other areas, local wireless access and cellular access may be available at the same time. For the most efficient use of communication resources, it would be preferable to use local wireless access if possible to conserve cellular resources. Given the complementary nature of cellular and local wireless access, mobile terminals are being developed to support voice and broadband services over both cellular and local wireless networks.
There is a new trend toward providing high quality digital audio and video content to large numbers of mobile terminals. Certain types of content need to be made available to very large numbers of mobile terminals, wherein other types of content need to be sent to relatively large groups of users at any given time. For on-demand content, only one or a few mobile terminals may need certain content at any given time. Accordingly, there is a need for unicast, multicast, and broadcast delivery of content to mobile terminals. In current third generation standards proposals, multicast and broadcast content flows are broken into unicast streams in a cellular network and delivered to mobile terminals in individual content flows. Transmitting large numbers of redundant content flows through cellular network is very inefficient, and most cellular networks would not be able to support large numbers of high-quality video sessions.
In an effort to avoid the inefficiencies of the third generation proposals, the use of a licensed or leased broadcast channel for delivering multicast and broadcast messages to cellular users has been discussed. However, the limited number of available channels and the lack of a feedback or signaling channel limits the ability to distribute select content to smaller groups of mobile terminals. Further information may be reviewed in the Digital Video Broadcasting for Handheld (DVBH) and MediaFLO™ proposals. Unfortunately, these proposals are greatly limited in their ability to optimize resource use and offer the flexibility to provide various types of content and qualities of content to different groups of mobile terminals. Further, these standards fail to take into consideration the integration of cellular and local wireless communications.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved technique for distributing content among mobile terminals through disparate networks in an efficient and effective manner.